"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
John Stuart Mill

Monday, October 05, 2009

8 Fort Carson Soldiers Killed in Battle in Afghanistan

Eight soldiers from Fort Carson's 4th Brigade Combat Team died in Afghanistan when insurgents attacked a pair of remote outposts in Nuristan province, two Colorado Springs media outlets reported Sunday.

The Army hasn't identified the dead, but the Colorado Springs Gazette and KOAA-TV said military sources confirmed that all eight were from the 4th Infantry Division's 4th Brigade, which went to war in May.

U.S. military officials said Sunday that the day-long battle near the Pakistan border, in which the eight U.S. soldiers were killed as hundreds of insurgents stormed a pair of remote outposts, is likely to fuel the debate in Washington over the direction of the troubled eight-year war effort.

The insurgents were armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades during the fierce gunbattle Saturday in the Kamdesh district of Afghanistan's mountainous Nuristan province. It was the heaviest U.S. loss of life in a single battle since July 2008, when nine American soldiers were killed in a raid on an outpost in the same province.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, plans to shift U.S. troops away from remote outposts that are difficult to defend and move them into more heavily populated areas as part of his new strategy to focus on protecting Afghan civilians.

U.S. troops used artillery, helicopter gunships and airstrikes to repel the attackers, inflicting "heavy enemy casualties," according to a NATO statement. Fighting persisted in the area Sunday, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for NATO, said the assailants included a mix of "tribal militias," Taliban and fighters loyal to Sirajudin Haqqani, an al-Qaeda-linked militant based in sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan near the Afghan border.

Afghan authorities said the hostile force included fighters who had been driven out of the Swat Valley of neighboring Pakistan after a Pakistani military offensive there last spring.

"This was a complex attack in a difficult area," U.S. Col. Randy George, the area commander, said in a statement. "Both the U.S. and Afghan soldiers fought bravely together."

Details of the attack remained unclear Sunday, and there were conflicting reports of Afghan losses because of poor communications in the area, 20 miles from the Pakistani border and about 150 miles from Kabul.

A NATO statement said the attacks were launched from a mosque and a nearby village on opposite sides of a hill, which included the two outposts — one mostly American position on the summit and another mostly Afghan police garrison on a lower slope.